In this groundbreaking book, Akbar Ahmed, one of the world's leading authorities on Islam, who has worked in the Muslim world but lives in the West, explains what is going wrong in his society by referring to Islamic history and beliefs. Employing theological and anthropological perspectives, he attempts to answer the questions that people in the West are asking about Islam: "Why do they hate us?" "Is Islam compatible with democracy?" "Does Islam subjugate women?" "Does the Quran preach violence?" These important questions are of relevance to Muslims and to non-Muslims alike. Islam Under Siege points out the need for, and provides the route to, the dialogue of civilizations.
September 11, 2001, underlined the role of Islam in our time. In its demographic spread, its political span, and its religious commitment, Islam will be an increasingly forceful presence on the world stage in the twenty-first century. While some scholars predict that there will be a clash of civilizations, others see a need for a dialogue of civilizations.
This book will help students, scholars of politics, sociology, international relations, and cultural studies, and reporters as well as a more general audience interested in some of the most important issues of our time.
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i The Return of Anthropology and the Final Crusade
Anthropology has much for which to thank bin Laden. After decades of criticism, anthropology was on the ropes not long ago. Its founding fathers and mothers were discredited: Bronislaw Malinowski for lusting after young natives and Margaret Mead for cooking up ethnographic accounts. Its own practitioners despaired and predicted “The End of Anthropology” (title of Worsley 1966; see also Banaji 1970). When the field appeared at its weakest, the powerful new voice of Edward Said emerged to denounce it as tainted by the dreaded word “Orientalism” (title of Said 1978). Perhaps the unkindest cut was that anthropology was not even seen as a bulldog in the service of the Western imperialists but rather as a mere puppy. Students of anthropology wandered aimlessly – sometimes into post-modernist literary conceit and sometimes into autobiographical excess. Like John Keats’s knight in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” anthropology appeared to be “ailing.” It appeared “alone and palely loitering.”
September 11 changed all that. The main interests of anthropology – ideas of ethnicity, group loyalty, honor, revenge, suicide, tribal code, the conflict between what anthropologists call the Great Tradition of world religions and their local practice or the Little Tradition – were being discussed everywhere. Perhaps people were not even aware that they were discussing these issues as they were identified with traditional, even “primitive” societies, and therefore discredited; now they were front-page news. What was clear was the sense of hyper-asabiyya – and the accompanying paranoia and uncertainty.
Ironically, most religions and communities across the globe felt they were under siege. American television broadcast its news and discussions under the title “America under Siege”; Israelis felt the Arabs had besieged them; and Indians complained of being hemmed in by aggressive Muslim neighbors. The United States, Israel, and India appeared paralyzed in the face of Muslim suicide bombers. They had no answer to the violence except more violence.
With each killing the siege mentality spread. State strategy appeared to be to use more brute power and inflict more pain on the opposite side. Where vision and compassion were required, the state was seen to kill and maim people and destroy property. Its representatives did not even spare the mosque, the house of God.
The United States, Israel, and India were compromising hard-won ideas of a modern, thriving democracy. There were cases of illegal detention, suspension of civil liberties, and unauthorized surveillance. The victim was invariably a Muslim.
Muslims, whether living as a majority, or a minority, felt especially vulnerable after September 11. The fact that all 19 of the hijackers were Muslim appeared to condemn by association every Muslim on the planet. Any expression of Muslim identity risked the fear of being suspected as “terrorist” activity. Muslims felt that their religion Islam was under siege.
The road to the Crusades
In the last years of the 20th century a general if amorphous perception had begun to form in the West that with the fall of Communism the new global enemy would be Islam. The idea crystallized on September 11. Bush’s declaration of a “crusade” against the “Islamic terrorists” followed. In the wake of the negative media response abroad to the word “crusade” Bush swiftly dropped it. However the Freudian slip had hinted to some that the war would indeed be a crusade against Islam. Other world leaders were less sensitive than Bush about the use of the word “crusade.” Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, declared publicly that Islam was the main enemy of Western civilization.
But who represented Islam? Was it bin Laden and Al-Qaeda or a specific nation or nations or the entire Muslim world? If the definition of the enemy was vague, the length of the war was even vaguer; nor were the boundaries of the theater of operations any clearer. The full might of the United States would be used against the “terrorists” wherever they were to be found and the war would be indefinitely waged until the enemy was destroyed. Private media and official institutions came together in a formidable spirit of determined unity. Clearly this was going to be more than a military campaign managed by the Pentagon to fight a small group hiding in the caves of Afghanistan.
By thinking and acting in crusader mode Bush was rejecting ideas of multi-religious multiculturalism. He was rejecting postmodernist pluralism and reviving what writers and artists called the Grand or Meta Narrative, which underlines domination by a monolithic idea or culture. In pursuing his war on terrorism Bush, with his “You are with us or against us” approach, also was rolling back the postmodern age to a time of certitude, defined borders, and monolithic ideas. He had turned the clock back a thousand years. Once again the West was launching armies against Muslim lands and people; once again the dividing line was to be religion; once again ideas of honor, revenge, dignity, culture, and community became important.
Bush’s adversary bin Laden was rejecting the West, which he saw as corrupting. He talked of the loss of honor among Muslim leaders, of the plight of the Palestinians and the Iraqis, and of the loss of dignity of his own people, the Saudis, due to the presence of American troops. To him the United States was evil and had to be battled. (For the story of another Muslim, Ajab Khan, who challenged – and temporarily shook – a Western superpower see chapter 2, section ii).
The protagonists recognized early in the struggle that this crusade was about changing minds, not conquering territory. But with wedding party guests being killed in Afghanistan by American bombing, it was hard to expect the good will earned in removing the Taliban to last. In the end, to ordinary Afghans, being killed by Bush’s bombs or those of bin Laden made little difference.1
Matters were made worse because of the mutual lack of understanding. Americans associated empty caves in the Afghan mountains, the firing of weapons into the sky, and the storage of ammunition and weapons with terrorist activity. For the people of the region, however, for generations caves had meant nomadic tribes moving to cooler climes in summer; firing into the sky a mark of celebration at birth and marriage; and the storage of weapons an insurance against tribal rivalries.
So far, two crusades have pitted the West against Islam. The first began in the 11th century and, after several waves of European warriors were exhausted, ended in the 13th. The second, which took the form of straightforward European colonization, occupied the 19th and first half of the 20th century. Both crusades began with triumph for the West and the capture of Muslim lands, but both ultimately failed.
Both have been seen as a clash of military forces but they were also a competition of cultural and intellectual ideas. The West was at a distinct disadvantage one thousand years ago as Muslim civilization was already established as the pre-eminent cultural and political force. It was the time of rulers like Saladin, who on recapturing Jerusalem from the Crusaders could show magnanimity in spite of vowing to avenge their bloody massacres. It was the age of the towering scholars and mystics of Islam – Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi,2 Abdullah Ibn Sina, Abu Raihan Al-Beruni, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazzali, and Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, to name a few.3 Their prose and poetry reflect inspiration from the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran; from Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace be upon them). When Rumi died, a Christian is on record as being asked why he wept so bitterly, and his answer was: “We esteem him as the Moses, the David, the Jesus of the age. We are all his followers and his disciples” (Shah 1990: 149). Not surprisingly the early makers of European consciousness – Aquinas, Dante, and Cervantes – were influenced by what was seen as the irresistible global culture influenced by Islam.
As late as the 17th century, Muslim rulers were advocating tolerance. Akbar the Great in India ordered his governors to spend their spare time reading Al-Ghazzali and Rumi. On the main entrance to his grand city Fatehpur Sikri, soon to be deserted for lack of water, Akbar inscribed the following lines: “Jesus, on whom be peace, has said: This world is a bridge. Pass over it. But build not your dwelling there” (Jeremias 1964: 112; his section titled “The World is a Bridge” on p. 111 discusses the origins of this saying and its attribution to both Jesus and the Prophet of Islam).
Akbar’s grandson Dara Shikoh carried on the tradition of tolerance by wearing a ring inscribed with “Prabhu,” the Sanskritic name for God, keeping the company of yogis, and patronizing translations of the Upanishads and Bhagawad Gita into Persian. Dara Shikoh was not renouncing Islam, and his ideal remained the Prophet of Islam. But his tolerance cost him his life. The Muslim world was already changing.
The situation between Islam and the West was reversed two centuries later when Europeans slowly but inexorably colonized Muslim lands in the imperialist crusade. This time Europeans could dismiss with contempt Muslim culture and thought. Lord Macaulay, the author in 1835 of the famous “Minute on Education,” which would influence the intellectual and cultural direction of South Asia, dismissed the entire corpus of Arabic literature – he threw in Sanskrit for good measure – as not equal to one European bookshelf. Even sensitive poets like Lord Alfred Tennyson dismissed the Orient in similar comparisons: “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay” (in “Locksley Hall,” 1842).
Subjugated and humiliated, Muslim culture still showed flashes of tolerance. But the choices – and subsequent dilemmas – were tearing Muslims apart. Mirza Ghalib, Urdu literature’s greatest poet, wrote in the middle of the 19th century: “My belief (Islam) constrains me while the acts of the non-believers attract me. The Kaaba (house of Islam) is behind me and the Church (the house of Christianity) in front.”
The final crusade
Irrational hatred of others, the primordial urge to take revenge, the obsessive humiliation of women, and the declaration of holy war – this was familiar to us from the two crusades I have mentioned. However, the current crusade – because of our world’s cultural complexities and the apocalyptic nature of our weapons – threatens to be the final round. It promises to resolve the unfinished business of subjugating or subduing Islam begun a thousand years ago.
Bush’s notions of a crusade met, head on, those of bin Laden, who was already engaged in a holy war against America. Bin Laden, like many in the present generation of Muslim activists, is influenced by men like Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian cleric executed by the state for treason in 1966 (see chapter 4, section i). Anti-Semitism, hatred of Israel and America, and a violent interpretation of Islam – the ideological stanchions that we recognize in many young Muslims today – were being set in place half a century ago. Muslim society has come a long way from the tolerant brotherhood of Rumi and the magnanimous chivalry of Saladin.
After September 2001 prominent Muslims – especially those living in or influenced by the West – denounced bin Laden and pronounced him and his politics “dead” (for example the Paris-based Amir Taheri in “A Perverter of Islam: Bin Laden and his Politics are dead,” in the International Herald Tribune, July 12, 2002). They are wrong. Bin Laden has become a larger-than-life symbol of many things, including standing up to the West, to Muslims throughout the world. Muslim parents in their thousands are naming their sons Osama. Most important: Bin Laden has helped to trigger the present crusade.
As an idea, the present crusade is a powerful one especially as it brings with it such deep historical, cultural, and religious memories. It is also a severely problematic and limited idea in its application. As enunciated by Bush, the philosophy of this crusade – “You are with us or against us” – appealed to as many as it repelled. Too many Muslim leaders, wined and dined in the capitals of the West, were vying with each other to sign up with Bush as his standard-bearers; many were loathed by their people for their blind obedience to America (Pakistanis contemptuously called Musharraf, “Busharraf”); many Western voices denounced Bush’s campaign as it promised an open-ended, unending, and uncertain global conflict.
Because of the importance of cultural and intellectual ideas, the media, including film, are seen by both sides as key participants in the present crusade. The important voices for interfaith dialogue and understanding continue to speak up but find it difficult to be heard amid the noise.
After September 11 commentators on Islam were suddenly everywhere in the media. Much of what they had to say was racist and religiously prejudiced; it was hostility disguised as serious comment. Even the more scholarly voices were divided. Some, woefully few, wrote with sympathetic objectivity.4 Some even talked of Islam as essentially a religion of peace and gave the historical example of Muslim Spain. They spoke of the grave misunderstanding between Islam and the West today. Others were more dominant and aggressive; they spoke of Islam as a terrorist religion and as the main threat to the West in the clash of civilizations.5 The debate exacerbated the already existing divisions in what in the United States is called Middle East Studies (Kramer 2001).
There was open talk of the United States invading Muslim nations beyond Afghanistan. Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya – even Saudi Arabia – these were discussed in the media as potential targets. Bush pointedly included Iraq and Iran as part of what he called an “Axis of Evil.” Bin Laden, like the Cheshire cat, began to fade from the horizon as public enemy number one and was replaced by Saddam Hussein. Bush also emphasized the concepts of “pre-emptive strike” and “regime change” in his foreign policy. The world was alarmed at where and how all this would end.
Nelson Mandela, on the eve of the first anniversary of September 11, publicly rebuked the United States. It was, he said, creating “international chaos in international affairs.” A few days later the German justice minister compared Bush to Hitler. This was absurd and unfair. It caused a furore, which exposed the complexity of the post-September world.
America’s global war on terrorism had splintered into a dozen little battles that fed into local conflicts. Lines had become blurred. Confusion prevailed. There was a danger of the world descending into a Hobbesian nightmare; a war of all against all.
ii The Sense of Muslim Siege
Never before in history, it appears, has there been a conjunction of factors that has allowed Muslims to kill and be killed on such a scale, with such extraordinary frequency, and in so many gruesome ways. If the actions of the hijackers had nothing to do with Islam, the causes and consequences of their actions will have everything to do with how and where Islam is going in the 21st century.
The day the 21st century began
Islam was at the heart of the events of September 11. On that extraordinary day, the President of the United States was on the run, zigzagging across America in Air Force One, escorted by F-16s and F-15s, until he returned to the capital late in the day to take charge. The stock exchanges were closed, all flights were suspended, emergency was declared in several states, and false alarms sent people scurrying for their lives. The scenes of panic on television would have seemed far-fetched in a Hollywood film.
But America began to recover quickly from the unprecedented carnage and mayhem; its native optimism struggled to reassert itself. The stars and stripes appeared everywhere, and interfaith dialogue was heard across the land. The president made a welcome visit to the Islamic Center in Washington DC, the city where I reside.
Dramatically, imperceptibly, the miasmic pall of uncertainty, of our lives being vulnerable and out of control, that hangs over much of the world now descended on Americans. People were aware that something had changed fundamentally. Like birds that vanish from the sky after a natural calamity the planes over Washington disappeared; the skies became eerily quiet except for the urgent sound of the helicopter, which added to the tension. When the flights resumed it was a relief to see something of normalcy return, but it was not the same.
In the weeks to come, the media stoked the sense of panic and even hysteria. Anthrax cases, fires in the subway, even a tremor in California – everything was instinctively being blamed on the “terrorists.” This Pavlovian response would soon be embedded in the American psyche. A year later commentators without hesitation linked John Allen Muhammad, the deadly sniper who killed and wounded thirteen people in and around Washington DC, to Al-Qaeda even before he was caught and identified as an African-American convert to Islam.
War was declared on “terrorism” and in early October 2001 the bombing of Afghanistan began. In the highly charged atmosphere of the United States at the time no voice was raised to point out that not a single one of the nineteen hijackers was an Afghan; neither was bin Laden an Afghan. It appeared as if someone almost at random had to be selected and sacrificed to avenge September 11....
